An anonymous reader shares a report: Last September, Amazon debuted a household robot named Astro that was supposed to usher in -- or at least point to -- a Jetsons-like future. Fifty-three minutes into a press conference otherwise focused on new Ring cameras, a thermostat and a giant Echo speaker with a wall screen, the three-wheeled robot rolled out on stage at the command of Amazon devices chief Dave Limp. With Astro looking on, Limp ticked off the gadget's attributes: advanced computer vision that lets the bot know where it is, home monitoring, media playback and the ability to summon emergency help for elders. Astro would eventually sell for about $1,450, but Limp said people lucky enough to score an invitation could get their hands on one for $1,000 -- or about the price of an iPhone 13 Pro -- and test it out at home.

In a video presentation of the unveiling, Henrik Christensen, a computer science and robotics professor at the University of California at San Diego, said, "Astro is a huge step forward. The next question will be: 'When should I get one?'" A more apt question might have been: When can I get one? Six months later, Astro is tough to find. Hardly anyone is talking about the robot -- which is confounding because early adopters typically love to share their experiences online. A scan for Astro users on YouTube, Twitter and Instagram turned up just two people, who posted brief videos of the bot. Turns out Amazon has so far shipped at most a few hundred Astros, according to people familiar with the situation.

Midwestern fast-food chain White Castle is outsourcing some of its jobs to robots. The hamburger chain announced plans last week to install Miso Robotics' "Flippy 2" in 100 locations. From a report: The Ohio-based chain has been experimenting with the robotic fry cook since September 2020, when the original "Flippy" was installed in a Chicago area restaurant. After upgrading to "Flippy 2" at the original test location in November 2021, White Castle decided to roll out a larger version of the program. "By taking over the work of an entire fry station, Flippy 2 alleviates the pain points that come with back-of-house roles at quick-service restaurants to create a working environment for its human coworkers that maximizes the efficiency of the kitchen," Miso Robotics said in a statement. "The improved workflow allows for the redeployment of team members to focus on creating memorable moments for customers."

"Thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts," reports the Houston Chronicle.

"With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations." From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said.

Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said.

"I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.

"Around this time last year, millions of Texans were shivering without power during one of the coldest spells to hit the central United States," remembers the Washington Post. "For five days, blackouts prevented people from heating their homes, cooking or even sleeping. More than 200 people died in what is considered the nation's costliest winter storm on record, amounting to $24 billion in damages.

"Twelve months later, the state's electrical grid, while improved, is still vulnerable to weather-induced power outages." "If we got another storm this year, like Uri in 2021, the grid would go down again," said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. "This is still a huge risk for us."

Now, a recent study shows that electricity blackouts can be avoided across the nation — perhaps even during intense weather events — by switching to 100 percent clean and renewable energy, such as solar, wind and water energy. "Technically and economically, we have 95 percent of the technologies we need to transition everything today," said Mark Jacobson, lead author of the paper and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. Wind, water and solar already account for about one fifth of the nation's electricity, although a full transition in many areas is slow.

The study showed a switch to renewables would also lower energy requirements, reduce consumer costs, create millions of new jobs and improve people's health....

The team found the actual energy demand decreased significantly by simply shifting to renewable resources, which are more efficient. For the entire United States, total end-use energy demand decreased by around 57 percent. Per capita household annual energy costs were around 63 percent less than a "business as usual" scenario.... In Texas, a complete green transition would reduce the annual average end-use power demand by 56 percent. It also reduces peak loads, or the highest amount of energy one draws from the grid at a time. Jacobson said many homes would also have their own storage and wouldn't need to rely on the grid as much.

The team also found interconnecting electrical grids from different geographic regions can make the power system more reliable and reduce costs. Larger regions are more likely to have the wind blowing, the sun shining or hydroelectric power running somewhere else, which may be able to help fill any supply gaps. "The intermittency of renewable energy declines as you look at larger and larger areas," said Dessler. "If it's not windy in Texas, it could be windy in Iowa. In that case, they could be overproducing power and they could be shipping some of their extra power to us." The study stated costs per unit energy in Texas are 27 percent lower when interconnected with the Midwest grid than when isolated, as it currently is.
Interestingly, long-duration batteries aren't important for grid stability. the team found, since our current 4-hour batteries can just be connected for longer-term storage. Professor Dessler tells the Post we should think of "renewables" as a system which includes storage technology and easily-dispatchable energy solutions.

And the Post adds that a grid powered by renewables "would also produce cleaner air, which could reduce pollution-related deaths by 53,000 people per year and reduce pollution-related illnesses for millions of people in 2050."

A recent post on the AWS Open Source blog announced that AWS "is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."

It was written by the chair of the Rust foundation (and leader of AWS's Rust team) with a Principal Engineer at AWS, and reminds us that Rust "combines the performance and resource efficiency of systems programming languages like C with the memory safety of languages like Java."

But there's another reason they're promoting Rust: Worldwide, data centers consume about 200 terawatt hours per year. That's roughly 1% of all energy consumed on our planet... [C]loud and hyperscale data centers have been implementing huge energy efficiency improvements, and the migration to that cloud infrastructure has been keeping the total energy use of data centers in balance despite massive growth in storage and compute for more than a decade... [I]s the status quo good enough? Is keeping data center energy use to 1% of worldwide energy consumption adequate..? [Will] innovations in energy efficiency continue to keep pace with growth in storage and compute in the future? Given the explosion we know is coming in autonomous drones, delivery robots, and vehicles, and the incredible amount of data consumption, processing, and machine learning training and inference required to support those technologies, it seems unlikely that energy efficiency innovations will be able to keep pace with demand...

[J]ust like security, sustainability is a shared responsibility. AWS customers are responsible for energy efficient choices in storage policies, software design, and compute utilization, while AWS owns efficiencies in hardware, utilization features, and cooling systems.... In the same way that operational excellence, security, and reliability have been principles of traditional software design, sustainability must be a principle in modern software design. That's why AWS announced a sixth pillar for sustainability to the AWS Well-Architected Framework. What that looks like in practice is choices like relaxing service-level agreements for non-critical functions and prioritizing resource use efficiency. We can take advantage of virtualization and allow for longer device upgrade cycles. We can leverage caching and longer times-to-live whenever possible. We can classify our data and implement automated lifecycle policies that delete data as soon as possible. When we choose algorithms for cryptography and compression, we can include efficiency in our decision criteria.

Last, but not least, we can choose to implement our software in energy efficient programming languages.

There was a really interesting study a few years ago that looked at the correlation between energy consumption, performance, and memory use.... What the study did is implement 10 benchmark problems in 27 different programming languages and measure execution time, energy consumption, and peak memory use. C and Rust significantly outperformed other languages in energy efficiency. In fact, they were roughly 50% more efficient than Java and 98% more efficient than Python. It's not a surprise that C and Rust are more efficient than other languages. What is shocking is the magnitude of the difference. Broad adoption of C and Rust could reduce energy consumption of compute by 50% — even with a conservative estimate....

No one developer, service, or corporation can deliver substantial impact on sustainability. Adoption of Rust is like recycling; it only has impact if we all participate. To achieve broad adoption, we are going to have to grow the developer community.
That "interesting study" cited also found that both C and Rust execute faster than other programming languages, the blog post points out, so "when you choose to implement your software in Rust for the sustainability and security benefits, you also get the optimized performance of C."

And the post also notes Linus Torvalds' recent acknowledgement that while he really loves C, it can be like juggling chainsaws, with easily-overlooked and "not always logical" type interactions. (Torvalds then went on to call Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution.")

The Rust Foundation is a non-profit partnership between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla.

Reuters reports: Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.... The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion....

Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation's oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation's gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports.
"Today, most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains 10 percent ethanol, and about a third of the corn crop in the country is used to produce the fuel..." reports Ars Technica: The extra land put under the plow released a significant amount of carbon, enough to flip the assessment of corn ethanol from a carbon-negative fuel to a carbon-emitting one. The biggest decline came when new cropland released carbon that had been stored in soils and vegetation, including roots of living plants. Farmers were also less likely to enter a field into the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to plant perennial vegetation on unused farmland.

After the fertilizer was applied, it released a significant amount of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere 300 times more than the same amount of carbon dioxide over 100 years. The researchers' estimates of the carbon impact of the fertilizer are probably low, too, since the authors didn't calculate how much additional pollution the manufacturing process released or the extent to which degraded water quality in downstream waterways released more greenhouse gases.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple geeks may be aware of the mystery of the handwritten Apple 1 serial number present on some of the surviving machines. Namely, no one knew how they got there. Steve Wozniak said that he didn't write them. Steve Jobs said the same. Daniel Kottke, who assembled and tested some of the boards, said it wasn't him. Likewise for Byte Shop owner Paul Terrell, who bought a batch of 50 of them... Achim Baque, who maintains the Apple-1 Registry (a listing of all Apple 1 computers), finally decided to try to solve the mystery. This, it turned out, would not be a trivial task.

Despite Steve Jobs' denial, the handwriting on the boards did seem to match his. However, since Steve rarely signed autographs, making his signature and handwriting especially valuable, the potential impact on the value of the machines with serial numbers meant that as much certainty as possible was needed. Baque asked one of the world's leading handwriting authentication services to compare the serial numbers on two of the Apple 1 boards with known samples of Steve's writing. California-based PSA said that they could do it, but photos wouldn't be sufficient -- they would need to carry out a physical examination of both the boards and the handwriting samples. The company's analysis would include the slant, flow, pen pressure, letter size, and other characteristics.

Daniel Kottke, who was a close friend of Steve, provided a number of letters and postcards written by Steve. Helpfully, these documents include a number of handwritten numbers. Baque then personally transported two of the boards, and the handwriting samples, to California for examination by PSA. The company took three months to perform the analysis, also studying many photos, before authenticating the handwriting on the boards as that of Steve Jobs. Finally, the mystery is solved! Steve clearly just didn't recall doing it. The full story has been reported at the Apple-1 Registry.

The little known Turlock Irrigation District (TID) in California has taken a bold and ambitious step to put solar panels on its open water canals, the first such project in the U.S. Interesting Engineering reports: Encouraged by a $20 million grant from the state, TID has announced Project Nexus that will trial the concept on two canal segments, to begin with. The project is the on-ground realization of a study conducted by researchers at the University of California Merced and University of California Santa Cruz. Published last year, the study used simulations to calculate that California's open canal system could save 63 billion gallons of water every year if it put a lid on top of its canals.

The researchers had suggested putting solar panels would help the canals become a hub of renewable energy as they could potentially produce 13 gigawatts of electricity. This is about a sixth of the energy that the state of California generates, TID said in its press release. The solar panels could be installed on top of the canals using suspension cables and the cooling effect of the water running below would also maintain the efficiency of the panels that are known to drop output on very hot days. The 63 billion gallons of water saved could be used to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or supply drinking water to as many as two million people.

The U.S. produced more petroleum than it consumed in 2020, and the numbers were essentially in balance in 2021, according to the Energy Information Administration. Axios reports: The surge in oil prices taking place in 2022 has radically different implications for the U.S. economy -- and for key geopolitical relationships in the Middle East and Russia -- than in past episodes when energy prices have risen. In the past, when oil prices spiked, the impact on the U.S. economy was straightforward: It made America poorer, as more of our income went overseas to pay for imported energy. Now, after the shale gas revolution of the last 15 years, the impact is more subtle. Higher fuel prices disadvantage consumers and energy-intensive industries, yes. But there is a counteracting surge in incomes for domestic energy producers and their workers. Higher oil prices no longer depress overall measures of prosperity like GDP and national income, but rather shift it around toward certain regions. Texas and North Dakota win; Massachusetts and North Carolina lose.

As recently as 2010, America imported 9.4 million barrels a day of oil more than it exported. That had swung to a 650,000 barrel per day surplus in 2020, and preliminary numbers for 2021 show trade pretty much in balance last year. To the degree the U.S. does still import oil, more of it is coming from our closest ally. Canada was the source of 51% of U.S. petroleum imports in the first 10 months of 2021, compared with 8% from the Persian Gulf. By contrast, the Gulf states supplied more than 30% of American petroleum imports in 2008.

As part of Intel's annual investor meeting taking place today, Raja Koduri, Intel's SVP and GM of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group delivered an update to investors on the state of Intel's GPU and accelerator group, including some fresh news on the state of Intel's first generation of Arc graphics products. AnandTech: Among other things, the GPU frontman confirmed that while Intel will indeed ship the first Arc mobile products in the current quarter, desktop products will not come until Q2. Meanwhile, in the first disclosure of chip volumes, Intel is now projecting that they'll ship 4mil+ Arc GPUs this year. In terms of timing, today's disclosure confirms some earlier suspicions that developed following Intel's CES 2022 presentation: that the company would get its mobile Arc products out before their desktop products. Desktop products will now follow in the second quarter of this year, a couple of months behind the mobile parts. And finally, workstation products, which Intel has previously hinted at, are on their way and will land in Q3.

A group of 21 industry groups aligned with the automotive and technology sectors is calling for Congress to finalize work on a bill to fund increased domestic chip production. From a report: Congress in 2021 authorized federal spending on research and design initiatives to boost domestic chip production and create a subsidy for domestic manufacturers. But the money still needs to be included in an appropriation measure before it can be doled out.

"It is essential Congress act swiftly to provide funding to make this law a reality," the groups wrote in a letter to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. A global semiconductor shortage that traces its origins back to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 has hampered U.S. car manufacturing and increased prices for consumers. Carmakers are competing with other makers of other electronic devices affected by the shortage, such as computers and mobile phones, for chips that have remained scarce for more than a year.

Robots are being trialled to deliver food and other items in South Korea, which is planning to allow them on roads from 2023. Nikkei Asia reports: Woowa Brothers, operator of the country's biggest food delivery app, started using robots on a trial basis in 2020 while a convenience store chain started in November 2021. The government plans to develop such robots for export in the future. For now, the government is working to give the robots a legal definition by the end of this year so that they can be allowed to operate on roads. They are currently banned on roads as the law treats them as unmanned "vehicles." As a trial, the government has established a special zone around an apartment complex in Suwon, a city on the outskirts of Seoul, where Woowa has begun a food delivery service using a robot it developed. The robot is called "Dilly Drive" and stands about 70 cm high.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The newest entrant in the fight for EV market share is going back to the future with an all-electric DeLorean. The infamous gull-winged car is being resurrected in Texas by a group of executives who most recently spent time at China-backed EV startup Karma Automotive. They're working with Stephen Wynne, who acquired the DeLorean branding rights in the 1990s and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles. [...] The new company is called DeLorean Motors Reimagined LLC and its chief executive officer is Joost de Vries, Texas business records and LinkedIn postings show. The firm will set up a headquarters and an engineering outfit in San Antonio, with potential to bring 450 jobs, the city's development arm said in a statement.

It's not the first time the idea of a DeLorean redux has surfaced -- web searches turn up stories every few years about how Wynne has tried to revive the brand or produce low-volume models -- but using an electric powertrain is a new twist on the idea. The original car gained notoriety in the early 1980s both for its quality problems and for the legal woes of its creator, the late John DeLorean, before the "Back to the Future" film franchise turned it into a pop-culture icon.

Newegg has apologised for dealing poorly with returns and open-box product sales, in the wake of a recent video from Gamers Nexus documenting its own terrible returns experience. From a report: The online retailer has now said it has now put in place new policies to ensure a hassle-free return experience on open-box products for motherboards and CPUs, though is light on the details. There's no doubt that the statement tweeted out by the company comes as a response to Gamers Nexus' recent videos outlining the channel's return experience for a Gigabyte Aorus Xtreme Z490 motherboard, which when combined total nearly two million views. It goes something like this: The hardware YouTube channel bought a motherboard via Newegg for testing, though shortly thereafter decided it was no longer required. It then sought to return the motherboard under Newegg's returns policy and shipped the product back to the retailer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: France is planning to build up to 14 nuclear reactors in an attempt to shore up the country's aging nuclear fleet while also reducing the country's carbon emissions. And while the first reactors won't open for years, the announcement could serve to undercut Russia's attempts to keep Europe dependent on natural gas. President Emmanuel Macron announced the decision last week, saying that state-backed Electricite de France, also known as EDF, will build six new plants starting in 2028, with the option to build another eight by 2050. EDF estimates that six next-generation pressurized water reactors will cost around $57 billion. The first could be commissioned as early as 2035.

The move is a sharp reversal of Macron's earlier pledge to close several reactors over the next decade or so. National politics almost certainly play a role -- the nuclear power sector in France employs around 220,000 people, according to one estimate. "What our country needs is the rebirth of France's nuclear industry," Macron said at a nuclear turbine factory that EDF had just purchased from GE. "The time has come for a nuclear renaissance," he said. Macron also said that EDF will build a prototype small modular reactor, or SMR, by 2030. SMRs are fission reactors that are designed to be built in a factory and transported to their final destination. They generally produce less than 1 MW of power and are intended to be more economical than traditional reactors, which are constructed on-site. EDF will face stiff competition from numerous companies, from heavyweights like Westinghouse to startups like NuScale and Chinese firms like China Huaneng Group, which are pushing to commercialize SMRs.

France's new plans were announced less than two weeks after the EU announced that nuclear power would be considered "sustainable," a decision that was subject to intense lobbying by the French government. It also comes at a time of heightened tensions with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Russia has flooded the EU with cheap natural gas, leaving the bloc dependent on the country for much of its energy. In 2020, the EU received more than 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which could double Russian exports to the region, appears likely to increase the bloc's dependence. Macron's announcement, while possibly coincidental, could signal that France is interested in taking over as Europe's power center.

New York State broke ground on Friday on its first offshore wind farm, kicking off a boom in similar projects aimed at transforming the state's -- and the nation's -- energy mix. The Verge reports: The South Fork Wind project off the coast of Long Island is expected to be operational by the end of 2023. New York has the largest pipeline of offshore wind projects underway of any state in the nation, with five in active development. South Fork Wind is being billed as one of the first-ever commercial-scale offshore wind farms in North America. Once completed, it should be able to generate 130 megawatts (MW) of power -- enough to power 70,000 homes in nearby East Hampton.

That alone amounts to a major scaling up of offshore wind capacity in the US. The nation so far only has two operational wind farms along its coasts -- off the shores of Rhode Island and Virginia -- with a combined capacity of just 42 MW. That's set to change dramatically over the next few years. Orsted and Eversource, the energy companies developing South Fork, have an even bigger project in the works nearby: Sunrise Wind, a 924-MW wind farm that's expected to break ground next year. Altogether, all the offshore projects under development in New York state's current portfolio total over 4,300 MW of clean energy. By 2035, the state hopes to harness more than twice as much renewable energy from offshore wind.

AMD on Monday completed the acquisition of Xilinx, creating a company that can offer various types of compute devices, including CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su told analyst Patrick Moorhead that the first processor combining Xilinx technologies will arrive in 2023, which is in contrast to the company's previous integration efforts. After AMD bought ATI Technologies in 2006, it took the company five years to build its first accelerated processing units (which included AMD's x86 cores and ATI's GPU). This time AMD inked a long-term development pact with Xilinx and was able to work collaboratively even before the regulators approved the transaction. It remains to be seen what exactly AMD plans to offer, but it is reasonable to expect the new processor to feature AMD's x86 cores and Xilinx's programmable engines.

The move will help AMD to continue expanding its presence in the datacenter sector and offer unique solutions that will combine IP ingredients designed by the two companies. Interestingly, the first fruits of the deal are expected to materialize next year. [...] The Xilinx business will become AMD's Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG), led by former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng. As a result, Xilinx will maintain its leadership for at least a while. Furthermore, AMD's embedded business will cease to be a part of the company's enterprise and semi-custom unit and will merge into AECG, which might be good news as executives from the enterprise division will now spend more time on EPYC CPUs. "The acquisition of Xilinx brings together a highly complementary set of products, customers and markets combined with differentiated IP and world-class talent to create the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader," said Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD. "Xilinx offers industry-leading FPGAs, adaptive SoCs, AI inference engines and software expertise that enable AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions in the industry and capture a larger share of the approximately $135 billion market opportunity we see across cloud, edge, and intelligent devices."

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2014, Google made a remarkable offer: anyone with a Google Apps for Education account in the US got unlimited storage for free. The logic was sound at the time. Three years earlier, the tech giant had launched the Chromebook -- cheap, robust and secure, the web-browser-based kit was a natural fit for education. The cloud was its primary storage, so what could be better than making that bigger than any hard disk in a Mac or Windows PC could ever swallow? The idea was that if you catch users when they are young, they're yours for life. The axiom had already been tested by both Apple and Microsoft, with creative types and workers in jobs with sensible shoes respectively. Google played on its own strengths as the first cloud-native platform for everyone. And lo, it was good. Seven years later, Google has killed the deal.

In place of all you can stash, each institution in the scheme was getting a total pool of 100TB to give to student and teacher alike. If they wanted anything more, the cash register was open. For a small primary school with a couple of hundred pupils, this was perfectly adequate. A large science-heavy university could have a single experiment using that much, however. That announcement was a year ago, and gave existing users 18 months of grace, with new users denied the unlimited package from, well, now. Those with experience of academic deadlines won't be surprised that it has taken this long for lots of people to notice.

France president Emmanuel Macron "has announced a 'renaissance' for the French nuclear industry," reports the Guardian, with plans to build at least six new reactors by 2050 and as many as 14, "arguing that it would help end the country's reliance on fossil fuels and make France carbon neutral by 2050...." Atomic energy provides about 70% of French electricity, and low-cost nuclear power has been a mainstay of the French economy since the 1970s, but recent attempts to build new-generation reactors to replace older models have become mired in cost overruns and delays. Presidential candidates on the right have supported more nuclear power plants saying France should have "sovereignty" over its electricity, while detractors on the left have warned of the cost and complexity of building new reactors. Environmentalists have raised safety concerns over radioactive waste that remains deadly for tens of thousands of years.

Macron said French nuclear regulators were "unequalled" in their rigour and professionalism and that the decision to build new nuclear power plants was a "choice of progress, a choice of confidence in science and technology".

He also announced a major acceleration in the development of solar and offshore wind power. He said France had no choice but to rely on renewables and nuclear and that the country would also have to consume significantly less energy in the next decades.

He said he would seek to extend the lives of all existing French nuclear plants where it was safe to do so....

The French government lobbied hard and successfully to get the European Commission to label nuclear power "green" this month in a landmark review which means it can attract funding as a climate-friendly power source.

Reuters reports: The White House is warning the chip industry to diversify its supply chain in case Russia retaliates against threatened U.S. export curbs by blocking access to key materials, people familiar with the matter said.

The potential for retaliation has garnered more attention in recent days after Techcet, a market research group, published a report on February 1 highlighting the reliance of many semiconductor manufacturers on Russian and Ukrainian-sourced materials like neon, palladium and others. According to Techcet estimates, over 90 percent of U.S. semiconductor-grade neon supplies come from Ukraine, while 35 percent of U.S. palladium is sourced from Russia. Peter Harrell, who sits of the White House's National Security Council, and his staff have been in touch with members of the chip industry in recent days, learning about their exposure to Russian and Ukrainian chipmaking materials and urging them to find alternative sources, the people said.
A "senior official" told Reuters, "We understand that other sources of key products are available and stand ready to work with our companies to help them identify and diversify their supplies."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the story.